John Harrington-WHAT WE USE - Laptop Kit

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Here's a video of our laptop kit, what it contains, and why we have what we have in it. Full transcript after the jump.

Transcript:
Hi, I’m John Harrington and we’re going to break out and break down the wide variety of equipment we use to deliver images to our clients. Next we are going to show you one of the equipment kits we use when we are traveling on assignment. Each kit is different and has a very specific purpose. So lets take a look.

One other thing that goes with us everywhere we go is our laptop. It’s in an Incase Satchel, a really nice slim satchel for everything that we have in here. We have an 80 GB portable drive, that’s a USB drive. Also in here are firewire cords.

One of the nice things is when we’re at a hotel, we can plug the Airport express into our hotel and we don’t have to be tethered to the desk at the hotel. For the airline that’s considerate, we can plug this right into the power at our seats, or we can put the cigarette lighter adapter on and use it with a cigarette lighter.
Here’s one of our two firewire card readers. Here’s a second firewire card reader. This is the new Lexar Card Reader; this is a SanDisk reader; two different brands, two different technologies, similar functions. This however is the newest one that lets us read the UDMA high-speed cards, which really takes advantage of the firewire 800 throughput.
A power adapter for the laptop of course, a secondary battery. Here’s our Firewire 800, we use a g-tech drive. That’s really great because it doesn’t require an external power source, although you can use one if you need to. This is our mother of all batteries; it’s a MaxPower 90 from SPS. This lets us run the laptop for many more hours than this battery, or the battery in here would let us run it for. Laptop, MacBook Pro, with a Cingular wireless card in there.

We also carry a VGA adapter so that we can plug our laptop straight into a standard VGA connector for an LCD projector or an external monitor that the client might have.

A lot of other knick-knacks that we have in here are an extra iPod, some triple A batteries for the headset, and we have the new iPhone iPod headset that’s got the microphone built into it. This is the SD card reader. One of the nice things is a little accessory is our ability to split our headphones into two. So if our client sitting next to us, and they want to watch the movie with us, or we have someone who just wants to watch a movie with us whose sitting next to us. This allows us to share our headphones.

This is a standard firewire to mini-firewire converter, and a backup Bluetooth headset for our phone. A backup pair of headphones for the client who wants to watch the movie with us, but actually doesn’t have a headphone set.

We have a handheld remote so that we can control our laptop remotely, when we’re doing a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. We have a backup, alternate version of a handheld remote. We have our primary Jawbone Bluetooth Wireless headset and our power connector. What’s nice about this is it plugs into the laptop and can be recharged via USB. We have a backup connector, so that we can connect the laptop to a regular VGA monitor. We have the ability to charge the iPhone.

We have a USB JumpDrive that allows us to store critical documents and critical files and applications. In addition, if you are working up in your hotel room and need to actually print out a document that you’ve got there; you can actually put the document onto the USB JumpDrive. Take it down to the hotel’s printer in the lobby or in their business room and print from the USB JumpDrive. And last, but not least, a CF card that’s a backup. We always have one extra card sitting in the laptop bag just in case.
Because we rely so critically on our laptops, we also travel with a secondary laptop. This laptop is in a Pelican 1490 Case. It’s got our charger, again our ability to connect into a VGA monitor, a separate airline adapter. The adapter also connects so that we can plug into the airline that way. Laptop, external extra battery, and two USB drives so that we can store our files that way. So that’s our laptop system, also referred to as our digital workstation.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

information

The Assignment Construct is a commentary about what went into, what went on behind-the-scenes, or otherwise occured before, during, or after an assignment. Everything from images of the setup, to choices of camera angle, client requests (and fulfillment), and so on.